Survey To Track Katrina Victims

A Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor announced last week that he is directing a long-term study of Hurricane Katrina survivors that aims to assess the disaster’s effects on their physical and mental health and determine how policymakers can best help them rebuild.

HMS Professor of Health Care Policy Ronald C. Kessler will lead a team that will conduct telephone interviews of a representative sample of 1,000 survivors from the New Orleans area and 1,000 from other Katrina-battered regions. They plan to contact these participants every three months for at least two years.

In the first round of interviews, the survivors will be asked questions about their lives before, during, and after the hurricane; whether they plan to return to their former homes; their mental and physical health needs; and how well they think public officials handled the disaster.

Kessler said that the results will be invaluable to policymakers.

“It’s difficult to make informed policy decisions without having some objective information about what the needs are in the population,” he said. “It’s difficult to get that information in disaster situations in general, but more so in this situation because of the massive physical dislocation of people.”

Benjamin F. Springgate, a fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator on the study, agreed with Kessler.

Springgate said the study would help public officials “make the decisions that will allow the population to come back if they choose to, and allow us to plan a community and a healthcare system that is really going to serve the needs of the people.”

Gregory V. Button, a disaster research expert at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, is interviewing Hurricane Katrina survivors for a separate study. He wrote in an e-mail that it is important to hear directly from those who have been affected by a disaster.

“Fifty years of robust disaster research has clearly demonstrated that the most rapid and sustainable recovery from a disaster occurs when the disaster victims themselves are directly involved in determining the recovery process,” he wrote.

Kessler and his colleagues are using several tactics in their efforts to compile a representative sample of the two million families he said were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The resources they are using include telephone lists compiled by the Red Cross, MSNBC, and other organizations. In addition, Kessler said the team is randomly calling tens of thousands of households every day to find people who have been displaced by the hurricane.

Kessler said that he expected to find differences between the results from the New Orleans survivors—who mostly faced damage because of levee damage—and those from elsewhere in the Gulf Coast.

“People in Mississippi and Alabama had an act of nature occur to them, whereas in New Orleans, a lot of people think it’s not an act of nature, it’s an act of bureaucratic inefficiency,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who are mad at the system for what happened in New Orleans, whereas in Mississippi, people are mad at God.”

The results from the study will be available publicly on an HMS website. The site will include not only the data that will be shown to policymakers, but also the narrative histories of the survivors.

“People were so distressed they needed to tell their stories,” Kessler explained. “It would be foolish for us not to capture the information.”

The study is being funded by a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Farris K. Tuma, the chief of the Traumatic Stress Disorders Research Program there, wrote in an e-mail that the NIMH decided to fund the study because, unlike past studies, it asks a representative sample of survivors about their health and human-services needs.

—Staff writer Alex M. McLeese can be reached at amcleese@fas.harvard.edu.by the hurricane.